A review by nadinekc
Augustown by Kei Miller

5.0

This book felt near perfect to me - language that's lovely and earthy at the same time, unforgettable characters (no matter how much page time they have) and a story that's a perfect, organic whole. Every tiny detail has a purpose and a web of connections to other details, but it's not a rigid construction like a house, it's more like a bubble, fluid and moving. I'm not the kind of reader (yet?) who finishes a book and immediately starts it again, but if I were I'd do it with this book.

Here's one example of that lovely language:

Her voice was not typical. Hers was not the rich alto one might expect from a churchified young woman in Augustown - not that gruffly textured sound that had in it the feel of planting cane or walking long distances, and that had at its centre a kind of brokenness which was where all its power sprang from.

The narrator is an exceptional voice too, at one point advising the reader:

Look, this isn't magical realism. This is not another story about superstitious island people and their primitive beliefs. No. You don't get off that easy. This is a story about people as real as you are, and as I once was before I became a bodiless thing floating up here in the sky. You may as well stop to consider a more urgent question; not whether you believe in this story or not, but whether this story is about the kinds of people you have never taken the time to believe in.